Wednesday, 12 November 2014

If ww2 was really about anti-fascism then why was the west pro-fascist before ww2?

The west did not care much about Franco's advance in the 1930s

The US had Japanese, Italian and German 'Internment camps'-concentration camps essentially- during World war 2.

WW2 involved co-opted the working class into support for capitalism and the bosses. WW2 representing if not the beginning then the increase in bureaucratic unions where union hierarchies operate as collaborators with the bosses and capitalists.

During ww2 strikes were suppressed.

Guns before butter policy

There was plenty working class radical anti-fascist movements and resistance e.g. Edelweiss Pirates.

"The real lesson of the Second World War was that it crushed the independent organisations of the working class. In the Axis countries they were taken apart, before being re-made as company unions by the occupying powers. In the Allied countries, unions lost their independence and became recruiting sergeants for the war effort"

The Allies used forced labour, too. Forty-eight thousand men aged 18 to 25 were sent down Britain's mines between 1943 and 1948. 21,000 seventeen year-olds were forced to dig. They were called the 'Bevin Boys' after Labour Minister Ernest Bevin. One in every ten that were called up for National Service in the Army were sent to the mines – after their ID numbers were ‘pulled out of Ernie Bevin's hat'. More than a third appealed, and a few were jailed for refusing.32 Conscientious Objectors, if they managed to convince a board of their sincerity, would then be forced to work in mines or on the land (composer Michael Tippet was jailed for three months for refusing)."

"
In Britain, the deal between labour and government was different from the German one. Instead of just coercion, the government and the bosses got the leaders of the trade unions onside. The trade union officials' support for the war was strong. Engineers' Union (AEU) president Jack Tanner – who had fought bitter battles with employers in the first world war - was thrilled:

Quote:

This is an engineer's war [...] It is a machine war with a vengeance. Whether it is in the anti-aircraft defences or the machines on land and sea, or in the sky, it is the engineer who stands behind them all"

That imperialist pig Winston Churchill, today still celebrated as an “anti-fascist”, enthused over Mussolini’s fascists in 1927 with the declaration: “Hereafter no great nation will be unprovided with an ultimate means of protection against the cancerous growth of Bolshevism”

"It was only when German imperialism, militarised under Hitler, re-emerged as an imperialist competitor to be reckoned with that the “democracies” began to be hostile to the Nazis. For all the capitalist countries involved, the second world war was no different in character from the first world war. It was an interimperialist struggle for redividing the booty of capitalist profits. The imperialist states of both the Nazi-allied Axis powers and the Allied “democracies” all fought to defend their “right” to oppress and exploit the masses of the world. "

The internment of Japanese Americans was the World War II confinement of between 110,000 and 120,000.

"PresidentFranklin D. Roosevelt authorized the internment with Executive Order 9066, issued February 19, 1942, which allowed local military commanders to designate "military areas" from which "any or all persons may be excluded." This power was used to declare that all people of Japanese ancestry were excluded from the entire West Coast, including all of California and much of Oregon, Washington and Arizona, except for those in government camps.[7] Approximately 5,000 "voluntarily" relocated outside the exclusion zone,[8] and some 5,500 community leaders arrested after Pearl Harbor were already in custody,[9] but the majority of mainland Japanese Americans were "evacuated" from their West Coast homes over the spring of 1942. The United States Census Bureau assisted the internment efforts by providing confidential neighborhood information on Japanese Americans. The Bureau denied its role for decades, but it was finally proven in 2007.[10][11] In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the removal when Fred Korematsu's appeal for violating an exclusion order was struck down.[12] The Court limited its decision to the validity of the exclusion orders, avoiding the issue of the incarceration of U.S. citizens"

"In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Civil Liberties Act, which apologized for the internment on behalf of the U.S. government and authorized a payment of $20,000 to each individual camp survivor. The legislation admitted that government actions were based on "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership"

"On January 2, the Joint Immigration Committee of the California Legislature sent a manifesto to California newspapers which attacked "the ethnic Japanese," who it alleged were "totally unassimilable."[31] This manifesto further argued that all people of Japanese heritage were loyal subjects of the Emperor of Japan; Japanese language schools, furthermore, according to the manifesto, were bastions of racism which advanced doctrines of Japanese racial superiority.[31]
The manifesto was backed by the Native Sons and Daughters of the Golden West and the California Department of the American Legion, which in January demanded that all Japanese with dual citizenship be placed in concentration camps.[31] Internment was not limited to those who had been to Japan, but included a small number of German and Italian enemy aliens"

"Those that were as little as 1/16 Japanese could be placed in internment camps.[32] There is evidence supporting the argument that the measures were racially motivated, rather than a military necessity. Bendetsen, promoted to colonel, said in 1942 "I am determined that if they have one drop of Japanese blood in them, they must go to camp."

Franco:

"His government was recognised as legitimate by the French and the British in February 1939. In April 1939, America recognised Franco as head of Spain.""Thursday 30 March 1939guardian.co.ukMr. Chamberlain announced in the House of Commons yesterday the British Government's decision to recognise unconditionally the Franco authorities as the legal Government in Spain. ""In 1955, John Foster Dulles, America’s highly influential Secretary of State, visited him. During the Cold War, Franco was seen as a safe bet against any spread of communism in western Europe."

"On 15 August, the United Kingdom banned exports of war materiel to Spain"

The United Kingdom proclaimed itself neutral; however, the British establishment were strongly anti-communist and tended to prefer a Nationalist victory. The ambassador to Spain, Sir Henry Chilton, believed that a victory for Franco was in the establishment's best interests and worked to support the Nationalists. British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden publicly maintained the official policy of non-intervention but privately expressed a preference for a Nationalist victory. Eden also testified that his government "preferred a Rebel victory to a Republican victory."

"Despite this, the British government discouraged activity by its ordinary citizens supporting either side."

"The United Kingdom and France recognised the Nationalist government on 27 February.[61]Clement Attlee criticised the way it had been agreed, calling it 'a gross betrayal... two and a half years of hypocritical pretence of non-intervention'"

"With World War II, the mythology of Fascism was enriched by a new element. This conflict was the necessary solution to problems both economic (crash of 1929) and social (unruly working class which, although non-revolutionary, had to be disciplined). World War II could be depicted as a war against totalitarianism in the form of fascism. This interpretation has endured, and the constant recall by the victors of 1945 of the Nazi atrocities serves to justify the war by giving it the character of a humanitarian crusade. Everything, even the atomic bomb, could be justified against such a barbarous enemy. This justification is, however, no more credible than the demagogy of the Nazis, who claimed to struggle against capitalism and Western plutocracy. The “democratic” forces included in their ranks a State as totalitarian and bloody as Hitler’s Germany: Stalin’s Soviet Union, with its penal code prescribing the death penalty from the age of twelve.Everyone knows as well that the Allies resorted to similar methods of terror and extermination whenever they saw the need (strategic bombing etc.). The West waited until the Cold War to denounce the Soviet camps."

World War II: a people's war? - Howard Zinn - Critical analysis of the idea that World War II was really a "people's war" against fascism, as opposed to just another inter-imperialist conflict with nothing to offer working people.

World war as class war - James Heartfield - Article documenting the pitiless subordination of people to production on all sides of that crisis, and argues against the idea that the war tipped the scales in the favour of the working class.

Armageddon: The Reality Behind the Distortions, Myths, Lies, and Illusions of World War II - Clive Ponting - Examination of World War II debunks many of the convenient myths that have grown up about the conflict, using irrefutable statistics and facts garnered from a wide variety of sources.

Churchill - Clive Ponting - Book challenging the Churchill myth, declaring that much of the accepted interpretation of Churchill's life stems from his own writings about himself, and, using more recent source material, questions his competence as a war leader and his true level of popularity.

The People as Enemy: The Leaders' Hidden Agenda in WWII - John Spritzler - Spritzler shows that Allied war aims were not democracy and self-determination, but were, as wars generally are, opportunities to suppress class rebellion.

In Our Time: The Chamberlain-Hitler Collusion - Clement Leibovitz and Alvin Finkel - On the cynical collaboration between the UK government and the Nazis in the 1930s.

Brute Force: Allied Strategy and Tactics in the Second World War - John Ellis - Ellis shows how the Allies won the war, not because of democratic principles or clever strategies, but simply because they could inflict more destruction on their enemies than their enemies could on them.

Churchills's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II - Madhusree Mukerjee - Mukerjee shows how Churchill was quite as indifferent to mass death in his Empire as Hitler and Stalin were in theirs.

War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War - John Dower - Dower writes of the atrocities committed by both sides in the Pacific War.

The Meaning of the Second World War - Ernest Mandel - Classic Trotskyist account of the war.

The poet Archibald MacLeish, then an Assistant Secretary of State, spoke critically of what he saw in the postwar world: "As things are now going, the peace we will make, the peace we seem to be making, will be a peace of oil, a peace of gold, a peace of shipping, a peace, in brief . . . without moral purpose or human interest . . ."

During the war, England and the United States set up the International Monetary Fund to regulate international exchanges of currency; voting would be proportional to capital contributed, so American dominance would be assured. The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development was set up, supposedly to help reconstruct war-destroyed areas, but one of its first objectives was, in its own words, "to promote foreign investment."

The economic aid countries would need after the war was already seen in political terms: Averell Harriman, ambassador to Russia, said in early 1944: "Economic assistance is one of the most effective weapons at our disposal to influence European political events in the direction we desire,.. ."

Was the war being fought to establish that Hitler was wrong in his ideas of white Nordic supremacy over "inferior" races? The United States' armed forces were segregated by race. When troops were jammed onto the Queen Mary in early 1945 to go to combat duty in the European theater, the blacks were stowed down in the depths of the ship near the engine room, as far as possible from the fresh air of the deck, in a bizarre reminder of the slave voyages of old.

The Red Cross, with government approval, separated the blood donations of black and white. It was, ironically, a black physician named Charles Drew who developed the blood bank system. He was put in charge of the wartime donations, and then fired when he tried to end blood segregation. Despite the urgent need for wartime labor, blacks were still being discriminated against for jobs. A spokesman for a West Coast aviation plant said: "The Negro will be considered only as janitors and in other similar capacities. . .. Regardless of their training as aircraft workers, we will not employ them." Roosevelt never did anything to enforce the orders of the Eair Employment Practices Commission he had set up.

Franklin D. Roosevelt did not share this frenzy, but he calmly signed Executive Order 9066, in February 1942, giving the army the power, without warrants or indictments or hearings, to arrest every Japanese-American on the West Coast-110,000 men, women, and children-to take them from their homes, transport them to camps far into the interior, and keep them there under prison conditions. Three-fourths of these were Nisei-children horn in the United States of Japanese parents and therefore American citizens. The other fourth-the Issei, born in Japan-were barred by law from becoming citizens. In 1944 the Supreme Court upheld the forced evacuation on the grounds of military necessity. The Japanese remained in those camps for over three years.

These German bombings were very small compared with the British and American bombings of German cities. In January 1943 the Allies met at Casablanca and agreed on large-scale air attacks to achieve "the destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial and economic system and the undermining of the morale of the German people to the point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened." And so, the saturation bombing of German cities began-with thousand -plane raids on Cologne, Essen, Frankfurt, Hamburg. The English flew at night with no pretense of aiming at "military" targets; the Americans flew in the daytime and pretended precision, but bombing from high altitudes made that impossible. The climax of this terror bombing was the bombing of Dresden in early 1945, in which the tremendous heat generated by the bombs created a vacuum into which fire leaped swiftly in a great firestorm through the city. More than 100,000 died in Dresden. (Winston Churchill, in his wartime memoirs, confined himself to this account of the incident: "We made a heavy raid in the latter month on Dresden, then a centre of communication of Germany's Eastern Front")

The United States Strategic Bombing Survey, set up by the War Department in 1944 to study the results of aerial attacks in the war, interviewed hundreds of Japanese civilian and military leaders after Japan surrendered, and reported just after the war:

Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.